1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recommender system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a recommender system incorporating hypothetical context information into recommendations.
2. Related Art
Users often use recommendation systems to discover items or locations that they might have trouble finding on their own. These recommendation systems only work well if they have preference information for the users. The more preference information the system has for a particular user, the more effective the recommendation typically is.
However, acquiring preference information can be difficult. Because there are many preferences, most users do not want to take time to specify them all. Furthermore, preferences may change depending on the context of use. In this case, the user may explicitly adjust their preferences using a mobile device, but user interface restrictions make this cumbersome. Finally, the user may be unaware of some preferences that he makes subconsciously.
Existing systems do use contextual data to adjust preferences automatically. For example, users generally prefer places near their current location. A mobile recommender system may show a list of places, sorted by proximity to the person. However, context-aware systems today only use the current context to modify preferences.